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It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the SEC had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs, and examined hundreds of thousands data points.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a MECE list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input! Read More »

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

As the function responsible for the moment of intersection between markets and products, services, and brands, Marketing is under intense pressure to adapt – not only to the ways customers want information, but also to the increasing ubiquity of data.

In our conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders around the world, the consistent theme we’re hearing is one of agility – marketers and their teams need to be able to tackle a wider variety of tasks and responsibilities in order to take advantage of fast shifts in the market.

Want to develop a more agile team? Read on for some tips gleaned from our conversations:

1) Develop a T-shaped workforce. These are employees with one deep area of expertise, but also a wider breadth of skills/knowledge.  This is important in a world in which roles are more ambiguous/complex, and staff need to collaborate with other roles/functions (and therefore need to understand them).  Having a T-shaped workforce also helps shift people about, an important organizational capability in times of turbulence.   Read More »

I’ve been getting a lot of questions on Sales and Marketing Integration of late, ranging from highly strategic questions like “how do Sales and Marketing get more aligned?” to more tactical questions like “who should own the lead generation process?”

The SEC has studied Sales and Marketing Integration quite a bit over the last few years, and whatever the question, the answer almost always leads back to two things:  Ownership and Leadership.

Ownership:

In every organization, there are some activities where ownership is clear (e.g. compensation and goal setting is most commonly owned by Sales, mix modeling is typically owned by Marketing, etc.).  However there are many capabilities that fall into a “grey area” where ownership is not always so cut and dry and require closer alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Last year, we set out to understand how dozens of B2B companies view 20 Sales and Marketing capabilities that fall into those “grey areas.”  We wanted to understand how companies view the importance, effectiveness, and ownership of the 20 capabilities and how that relates to the organization’s ability to achieve commercial outcomes like consistency of message, effective funnel management, increasing share of wallet, market share growth, customer loyalty, and so on.

And as we shared with you in a previous post, what mattered most is that Sales and Marketing agree on who OWNS each capability to begin with. Read More »

As part of our research last year about gaining commercial alignment, we asked sales and marketing executives to force-rank their priorities.  Somewhat surprisingly, ‘lead generation’ appeared toward the end of that list, with sales executives ranking it as an even lower priority than their marketing counterparts.

Now this may be an indictment on the quality of the leads.  But in this day of LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and any number of networking applications showing you exactly where people work, I wonder if we’ve set the bar too low.  The challenge for marketers and account managers is around generating introductions – nobody continues to simply need a list of prospects.

The bar for an introduction is much, much higher and requires some real commitment on the prospect’s part.  The willingness to take a quick call is, in and of itself, a pretty good qualifier for a prospect.

Refocusing the commercial organization to think about introductions (and not just leads) has some major implications: Read More »

(This post was originally written for the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing).

Last month we shared with you the 10 trends every sales exec must know in 2011. Are you also wondering what your counterparts in Marketing are worried about? Our sister program for marketing executives has started to see a few early trends for 2011 – here’s what they are:

1) Growth from new customers.  In 2009, flat was the new up.  In 2010, it was about getting back to growth, and generally that involved getting your best customers to give you new business.  In 2011 it’s time to go back to growth from new customers—and probably not the same ones you lost before.  This in turn means B2B marketing focusing on lead gen, content marketing, marketing automation and intelligence.

2) Global reorganization.  Speaking of growth from new customers – in many cases those customers are in new markets, given the much faster rate of growth expected in emerging markets overall.  This often means reorganizing the function; we’re seeing a focus on centralization to make sure expansion in emerging markets follows a central strategy. 

3) Social media breaks through for B2B.  At the end of 2009, we had almost every B2C company asking us what they should do about social media.  By the end of 2010, many had figured out their strategies.  We’re seeing the same trend in B2B now: 2011 is the year social media goes from a few experiments to a real strategy in B2B.

Of course, we’re not necessarily talking about B2Bs tweeting; I believe B2B organizations in particular have a real opportunity to build the kinds of communities their customers crave.  Every time I hear a success story about social media in B2B it seems to involve a dedicated community of customers who work together on projects or discuss common issues.  Read More »

A couple of months back, my colleague Andrew Kent wrote a post around what not say in your pitch deck, and that got me thinking in terms of what you should say.

Luckily, we periodically run customer surveys where we ask our members’ customers to tell us whether or not certain brand statements resonate with them. Unluckily, the reports are generally sobering: only 19% of brand statements resonate with more than 50% of customers. Most of the time, customers simply don’t agree that a given statement represents the company more than it does one of its competitors.

Worse, there also turned out to be a long list of “true but unimportant” statements with which customers agreed, but that did not appear to drive preference (that is, there was little to no correlation between how companies were scored in these attributes and between whether or not the customer stated a preference for the company). Somewhat challengingly, these statements tended to be about delivery and fulfillment. The message to companies here is that there is no unique virtue to having made it easy to order your products through various channels: customers assume that all their suppliers can do this.

But things get more interesting when we looked at what does drive preference. And here a few things stood out: Read More »

By Martha Gimbel

Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that football season is in full swing?

But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from SEC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management  Read More »

(This is a guest post by Whitney Satin of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for senior marketers.) 

History is ripe with famous feuds: the Capulets and Montagues, the Hatfields and McCoys, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Burr.  Enter Sales and Marketing to the fray: often at odds, though truly dependent on one another for the successful operation of any given company.  If early results from our sales and marketing alignment diagnostic are any indication, the two groups have managed to find at least some common ground: commercial messaging is crucial … and it’s something we’re not very good at it.

The pain points are many.  On the one hand, sales reps say that the messaging and positioning they get from Marketing is largely irrelevant.  More often than not, reps bypass Marketing’s collateral altogether, opting instead to create their own campaigns they believe will more quickly move customers through the purchase funnel.

On the other side of the floor, marketers often gripe that Sales fails to tailor messages to address the unique needs of different customers.  Once armed with a pitch, reps go on autopilot—or so the theory goes.  This results in missed opportunities to make the company’s given solution truly resonate with customers, which ultimately translates into missed revenue.

Finger pointing aside, it’s safe to say we must have a pretty broken machine when it comes to delivering consistent messages across the slew of interactions we have with our customers.  From advertising to product information to tradeshow collateral, the opportunities to send mixed messages are many and, as companies explore social media facets, still growing.  Read More »